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Friday, December 21, 2012

1. Do the Budget Yourself
On small indie projects, everyone in the crew usually ends up wearing a variety of hats. Of the various roles I took on, the one that I found to be particularly instructive was that of the Unit Production Manager; that crew member who – among other things – writes up the budget.

Seriously, you should have seen Patrick when we gave him $26 and sent him to Home Depot – he was like a kid on Christmas morning! ;)We wanted to show you that great interview lighting can be achieved on almost nothing (you can judge for yourself in our example).

The uncoated Samyang lenses are a great solution for achieving lens flare and a more vintage look using low-cost DSLR lenses according to Shoot Blue. All lenses are fully manual ‘cine-style’ and fitted with focus & iris gear rings. Set includes 14mm, 24mm & 35mm focal lengths.

A major event occurred today in the creative industry landscape: Adobe has acquired Behance, a juggernaut portfolio-sharing service used by many photographers to showcase their work.Based in New York, Behance has been growing like a weed since it launched back in 2006, and last month served upwards of 90 million views of the 3 million projects and 30 million images it hosts.

Now we have confirmation that Canon has a firmware update that supposedly fixes this issue, but not only are you going to have a tough time getting it, but you might even have a hard time getting a Canon representative to acknowledge that it exists.

The $699 RX100 was easily the most powerful camera per square inch and per dollar in 2012. Of course you are stuck with the zoom lens, but it is a rather good one. Image quality in stills mode is similar to the class leading Canon G1X but the RX100 is more innovative. It is smaller, genuinely pocketable, even walletable. Better lens, higher resolution, RGBW screen, faster AF and better video mode.

We've made a list. We've checked it twice. And it contains six tips that will help turn your holiday video into an artfully captured, skillfully edited memory to cherish forever. Whether you're a novice with a point-and-shoot, a regular ol' iPhoner, or a pro with a DSLR, follow these simple tips to master the art of the holiday video. Consider it our gift to you. You're welcome.

The bottom line here is that higher frame rates are like other advancements, there will be a short period while the technology ramps up to meet expectations. That goes for all elements of the process becoming better (including make-up effects) in order to pivot toward the strengths of 48 or 60FPS. If that happens, if 48FPS becomes the go-to for most directors, hopefully our eyes will adjust and it will be like adding color to a black-and-white world.

Hon Hai Precision, better known as Foxconn, is already the world's largest electronics manufacturer. Chances are if you've got a laptop, console or smartphone it was assembled in one of the company's many Chinese factories.

I have always been interested in movies, particularly stunts in movies because my Dad, Jimmy Broyden, is a veteran Canadian stuntman and stunt coordinator of 20 years. I have been performing stunts ever since I can remember but I started to be interested in filmmaking when my Dad would get me to sit with him and study stunts in movies.

My final answer: if HFR does become more of a standard, then we’ll all stop paying attention to the new technique, and perhaps be able to refocus on story. The points I make above about being able to choose where I look, and what I choose to focus on and getting lost in any part of the frame, and becoming more immersed by seeing "less" do ultimately make me doubt this will happen until the 3D process as whole gets much much better.

Let’s Cook | Stu Maschwitz | prolostA good write-up on using the Blackmagic Cinema Camera for the first time:

As perfectly expressed by Vincent Laforet (the generous loaner of this particular BMC), the Blackmagic Cinema Camera is a perplexing mix of unmatched bang-for-the-buck, along with some maddening shortcomings and inscrutable design decisions.

Made with After Effects | Chris Meyer | ProVideo CoalitionSend in clips for this 'competition.' Deadline is January 9:

We are happy to announce that for the third year in a row, we will be working with the folks from motion for their annual Made with After Effects show. Upload a piece up to 3 minutes long that heavily involved After Effects in creation, and you will have a chance to win prizes and get some well-deserved public recognition.

Digital Bolex Xmas Ornament | ThingverseA cute little 3D ornament...all you need is a 3D printer. Though you could probably make it out of cardboard....

This ornament is based on an illustration done for the Digital Bolex coloring book.

Architecturally, Thunderbolt is built for higher speeds than USB 3.0. My recommendation is use Thunderbolt for the best performance and reliability. If you need PC compatibility, use USB 3. Thunderbolt for Windows is coming soon and, when it arrives, is the best choice for maximum performance.

There was previously word on Kodak selling their patents, and now the company has officially sold its digital imaging patent collection to 12 big name companies such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft, to name a few. Every company who backed Intellectual Ventures’ and RPX Corporation’s bid will receive rights to Kodak’s intellectual property.

Blackmagic Design today announced a new lower price on its popular Compact Videohub to $2,995. Compact Videohub features 3 Gb/s SDI, ASI, auto switching SD, HD and 3 Gb/s SDI formats, full SDI re-clocking, USB, redundant power inputs, ethernet and serial router control for only $2,995.

Many photographers keep some sort of filter on their lenses at all times — even if it's just a UV filter to stop the glass from getting scratched. But what do you do when a filter gets hopelessly stuck? Photographer Craig Pulsifer was faced with exactly that problem, and the method he says was advised by a Canon Professional Service technician is more than a little scary.

My preference is to record most things (though not fuzz guitars) clean and flat. You can add a little grit later to taste when mixing, but you can’t take it away if you added too much when recording. To my way of thinking, any preamp that is not clean and flat is colored, and I’d rather add color later when I can hear all of the parts in context. A coloration that sounds good in isolation may sound bad in the mix, and vice versa.

Convinced that the old ways of releasing art-house movies were no longer profitable, Burns set out to build his own release models as a self-distributor focused on digitally streaming movies to multiple platforms via iTunes, Google play and VOD all with the publicity boost from his celebrity profile.

Pro Video Coalition's own Steve Hullfish brought the art of color correction from the dark arts to the light of day in 2002 with his book Color Correction for Digital Video: Using Desktop Tools to Perfect Your Image (now in its 2nd Edition), followed in 2008 by The Art and Technique of Digital Color Correction (2nd Edition just released). At this special Editors' Lounge, Steve Hullfish gave a boost to attendee's color correction skills by revealing his tips and tricks in an up close and personal presentation.

This is a great sign, and it means that we are going to see regular and consistent updates for the camera. The other big update, exFAT support, means the drives will now work natively with Windows machines, so you won’t have to use any software to read the drives if you’re not already on a Mac.

The images below were shot by my students during a RAW workshop held at 24/7 Drama in London The lighting is deliberately mixed, tungsten indoors, daylight outside. Click on the JPG to get a 1920 * 1080 DPX The DPX's were created in Resolve using flat settings for each camera. The lighting was varying in the background and the frames were not shot cincurrently.

In this episode of Red Giant TV, Aharon Rabinowitz walks you through the workflow used to create realistic fire for our film Tempo. He'll be using a combination of real fire footage, Trapcode Particular, and some 3rd Party plug-ins from Re:VisionFX.

The FS700 might have been forgotten and sidelined with all the fuss about the “new F” but it’s probably the cheapest route out there to achieve 4k RAW, and it’s still a super portable little camera capable of achieving really impressive high speed 1080p video right out of the box!

Mr. Scorsese is no stranger to digital, having shot on the Arri Alexa in 3D for Hugo, but a conscious decision was made by him and his DP Rodrigo Prieto to choose the formats that most suited the project. Many factors go into the camera choice at that level, but when cost is rarely a deciding factor on multi-million dollar movies, even getting a bunch of free ones probably wouldn’t do much to persuade a production like this (though a serious monetary investment might).

You can now download a dedicated YouTube camera app – YouTube Capture – for iPhone and iPod touch. The app lets you record a video clip and right after you are done filming, you can write a caption, select which networks you want to share to, and publish.

Is writing a quick "thank you" email a proper form of business etiquette, or just another frivolous piece of inbox clutter we could do without? In this piece, Peter Bregman of the Harvard Business Review examines how important thanking others via email can be.

Monday, December 17, 2012

As the first movie in wide release to be shot and shown in 48p, the acceptance – or success – of the movie is being closely tied to the future adoption of 48p. This is, of course, ridiculous. The success or failure of a single film is unlikely to define the future of a format. But we’re still left with the question: Is 48p (or High Frame Rates) a good thing, a bad thing, or just different? And why does this discussion feel suspiciously like the one about 3D?

Well, the stereoscopic 3D execution is not perfect, with numerous stereo window violations and some depth map/inversion errors on dimensionalized VFX shots. These are issues that left me with strained eye muscles (specifically in my right eye), and cannot be remedied by viewing the HFR version. However, overall the film has many good S3D moments and the visual effects (in 24 fps) are spectacular, but they start to show their seams at 48 fps.

If you can’t get around the usability issues, that’s perfectly understandable, but anything else that would make this camera better hardware-wise would make it that much more expensive. I don’t think this camera is all that appealing at $6,000-$10,000, but for $3,000, it’s an absolute steal to get footage that has just about as much resolution at 1080 and nearly as much dynamic range as cameras costing 10-20 times as much.

In this short, edited preview, Rule’s Equipment Manager, Adam Van Voorhis, and NoFilmSchool’s Managing Editor, Joe Marine, highlight key elements featured in their 2-hour Learning Lab session on the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. For more details, watch the 2-hour version! No time? Take a look at key aspects of the camera here!

I can’t stress enough the need to ‘balance’ the system to get proper performance. There’s never a danger of having “Too much RAM”, but too many processors is not necessarily a good thing!You can check this on your system – using the stock effects, when you render previews or render your output files, you should see all the CPU cores being utilized. They won’t exactly be used the same amount, but roughly, they all should be about the same for common tasks.

There will be significant progress made towards a new monetization model beyond the traditional ad-supported and subscription service ones. The American household spends, on average, nearly five hours per day watching video content. As such it is one of the best methods we know for generating product interest.

To Form a More Perfect | Dylan Callaghan | Writers Guild of America
Interview with Lincoln scriptwriter Tony Kushner:

My initial plan was to do September of 1863 all the way to the end and that proved to be just completely impossible. It was much too much material. Then after the [Writers] Guild strike in '07-'08, when I went back to work on it, I had a realization that I could focus just on the last four months and that pretty much every theme I'd begun to see as recurrent in the four years of Lincoln's administration occurred during that four-month period.

File this under 'News that's not news': Adobe has released updates to some Creative Suite applications that are available only to people who are subscribing to the Creative Suite. If you purchased the suite outright, you won't be getting this update (at least, not immediately.)

Lots of people are complaining (Adobe announces updates for cloud members only! | HD Warrior) but if you read Adobe's press releases, or attended any of their presentations when they announced CS6, you couldn't have missed that Adobe explicitly signaled their intention to do this.

Of course, they didn't phrase it as "we are going to release new features only to subscribers." Instead, they explained that having people subscribe would enable them to offer new features much faster.....[it's an accounting thing, or something...-Ed]

For Adobe it's a win-win situation:

Subscribers get frequent updates, which encourages customers to switch to the subscription model.

The subscription model makes it harder to illegally copy software

Adobe gets a more consistent revenue stream.

It ties their customers closer to them. Customers who previously bought every second or third update who convert to a subscription model will now be paying every year.

If a customer wants to switch to another platform, they are still tied to Adobe; they won't be able to open their older projects if they suspend their subscription. So if you switched to Avid, you'd still want to keep subscribing to Premiere for some time to come.

A subscription also means that customers are less likely to flee when the price increases. Sure, they will complain, but they can't just sit on their hands and not buy the next release if they think the price is too high. They'll have to keep paying that monthly subscription or they won't be able to launch their copy of Photoshop or Premiere.